Ranking renewable energy alternatives for Chicago by integrated analytic hierarchy process and VIseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje

Energy consumption is increasing in many regions and governments are compelled to develop and implement strategic energy investments. The limited amount of fossil fuels and their negative environmental impact are a major drive for countries to use more renewable energy. There has been a rapid increase in renewable energy investments at the beginning of the twenty-first century. However, compared to traditional fossil fuels, renewable energy entails more uncertainties, which increases the difficulty in making long-term, strategic investments. These uncertainties led to the need to apply different and effective methods and approaches for renewable energy investments. Recently, Multi-Criteria Decision-Making methods are used frequently to develop new and different solution methods in the solution of ranking energy systems. This study uses Multi-Criteria Decision-Making methods for strategic renewable energy investment. This study aims to provide a model to assist decision-makers in renewable energy alternative selections by using two popular Multi-Criteria Decision-Making methods, Analytic Hierarchy Process and VIseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje. Analytic Hierarchy Process was used to evaluate the weights of the criteria by pair-wise comparison. Then, the VIseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje method was used as the second part of the study to rank the alternatives by their weights of importance. It is observed that each renewable energy alternatives have different priorities and performance values under each criterion in the city of Chicago. Then, it is concluded that energy efficiency has the highest ranking as the best performing alternative in Chicago.